Google+ / Scrape-n-Displace

Google's eHow-lite QnA scrape-n-displace offering where they published scraped third party questions and answers into the search results is becoming far more widespread, with 500%+ growth in the past 5 months.

Scammers are increasingly using the holiday rush to return counterfeit products in the place of the originally purchased products. In spite of the still pervasive counterfeiting problem, Alibaba is getting many major international brands to sell on Tmall Global.

More SEOs are publicly writing about how Google's approach has broke the web: "major publications have told us that their new policy in response to Google’s algorithm changes is not to link out to sites at all. They warned us that if they put the piece back through editing the link would be removed entirely."

Hacked sites monetized by Google AdSense are still ranking well in Google, even weeks after SEL asked about them. One person wrote a 3-part series complaining about getting outranked by hacked sites which published stolen copies of their content.

Fig takes a spin on the KickStarter model by allowing people to both back a project & to invest in its outcome. Here is an interview of Double Fine's Tim Schafer on using the platform to fund Psychonauts 2.